On the cost of SEO

​Hi, Steve – that’s a great question and I hope you find an easy answer. As an SEO service provider, I’ve worked on finding the same answer for many years. Just do a search for mousehelp, or mouse help and you’ll see I’m making progress…. Search, “Palm Desert SEO Expert” and you’ll find better search engine results pages (SERPS) for the work I’ve done.

My questions to you: Are you going to do the work yourself, or are you looking for someone you can pay to provide these services? The answer to what is affordable comes down to return on your investment – of either time or money. If every new client represents $1000 in income for your business and you get one new client for every $100 you invest in SEO services, does that match your idea of “any affordable way?”

You can do this yourself. You simply have to regularly post good content with links back to your website. By good content, I mean relevant to the people who search.

Example: If I were to write an article on basket weaving and link it to my site about SEO, that would be considered irrelevant and pointless by the algorithms Google runs. Trust me, they are good at weeding out junk.

Better example: You write an article detailing the many benefits of acupuncture, with links back to your website for further reading, and post it on your blog, post it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the multitude of other social media sites, and if you get enough interest, Google will take notice and give you the “SEO juice” you seek.

Let’s say that you’ve just posted something on Facebook and you want to preserve it for posterity on another website or blog. Here’s what I’m doing here.

After I posted something on my profile page (a.k.a., my personal Facebook page), I shared it, with a couple of complementary links, on my Facebook fan page (a.k.a., my business Facebook page), so my fans could see what I’ve been up to on a Saturday afternoon. Are you with me so far?

Then, on my Facebook fan page, I click the little drop-down menu arrow at the top right of the post. From that menu, I click Embed Post. (You may have to choose “More Options,” to get to “Embed Post.”) Facebook shows the code you need to copy, which links to your post from a web page, Tweet, or wherever it was you were going with this.

Now that I have the code, all I have to do to put it on this page, is paste it into a frame and we should be good to go!

Very few people will respond. (3 responses, not including my original test of the form)

A subset people who like your Facebook fan page will click the post. (23 out of 101)

Of those who do click, an even smaller (percentage based) subset voluntarily participates, where voluntarily means without being prompted by me. (1 of 23)

The issue:

The poll was, ostensibly, an attempt to determine who cares about grammar. In retrospect, it may just have been one more way for this author to rail about the apparent lack of concern Social Media users and in some cases; writers in general, have about the proper use of grammar, punctuation, and sentence syntax in the things they post online. Given the length of that last sentence, I now experience angst over that very same issue. Did I get it right?

I want to put the writer in a headlock and rub my fist on his hairy head, until he gets the idea that good grammar and proper English usage does matter. That’s my version of senseless violence (question #1 in the poll). “I want to (fill in senseless violent act here) the writer!”

I stop reading after I encounter the first few errors (unless the material is very important to me.)

I empathize with the author, especially if I believe they simply must produce content on a deadline, and I appreciate content they’ve produced in the past. In these cases, I usually point out the error and let them do what they will with my feedback. Most often, I get appreciation as their response.

I notice them and I decide to continue reading, or not, but it’s never, “no big deal.” In fact, refer to response number two. It is a deal breaker, unless the content is important to me.

Finally, here is one last iteration on the fact that the usefulness of the content is the greatest qualifier. Perhaps, “upset” is not the correct word, as more often than not, I feel compassion for my fellow writers.

Lessons learned:

Do some research on opinion polls before you create (your next) one.

Don’t expect a response that provides any meaningful information.

Test the idea of asking for identification and permission to use respondents’ information in posting results.

It seems we all may need a bit of advice from time to time. Here, then, for your perusal, is some of that, from one of the best. Thanks to Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger, for helping to light the way!

Focus on the positive, be a good example and be willing to take the next step, one post closer to achieving the goal! Thanks for reading. Now I have to learn and post a SlideShare, so I can help my clients with that, too!

Sometimes I forget that what I post on Facebook goes immediately onto my Twitter account. Then, I’ll post something useful and someone will start following me. That’s when I realize the power of relevance in a content driven online presence. When I see something useful, sharing it with others seems like such a natural response.

So, I ask you: What have you seen lately that you really think your friends and followers might find useful? Consider your posts and pick the top 10, top five, top two, and show them to me. Give me something useful and I’ll share it with my circles.

Finally, I’m on board with building a list. And, I have chosen SumoMe to help me do this. After years of hearing people say, “The money is in the list”, I’ve decided to go for it. For those of you who like to say, “It’s about time”, yes, I agree.

One of a small business’s best marketing assets is a healthy email list. While proper management and use of your email file will drive revenue immensely, it is often a challenge to create the email list itself.

So, with phrases like, “best marketing assets” and “will drive revenue immensely”, you may have to agree, this is something worth doing. If you agree this may be a challenge for you, call or write!

So, how do we get started? Well, that’s where the big question lies. It depends on what you do, how you do it, and what you plan to share with your subscribers. Yes, it is also driven by which service you use to manage all of this electronic communications traffic.

You may already know some of the big names, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, or Aweber, or maybe even Infusionsoft. They all want to be your provider for email marketing. Each has its features, levels of complexity, and price. How to make that choice is beyond the scope of this article.

I’ve used three of the four (excluding Infusionsoft) in the past and in the present. Currently, I’m focused on MailChimp, for simplicity’s sake.

When I found SumoMe (by way of a successful Real Estate flipping website in San Antonio, where I did some SEO work), it was a pretty easy sale. Instructions on their website are very straightforward (if you know how to manage your website’s content) and it took about five minutes to install and configure the app. Of course, for me, that’s five minutes times a handful of sites, so I spent the first 20 minutes just dropping code into place. Today, I finally delved into some of the advanced features and other cool things you can do with this tool. It all comes down to one goal, which is to get somebody to give up an email address, so you can send them your stuff. For me, that’s going to be a newsletter, with snippets from my blog articles.

In the interest of brevity, I’m going to wrap this up here. But, you know you can always get in touch with me, if you need more help with email campaigns, newsletters, or a cool tool like SumoMe, to help you get more subscribers and build that list!

This morning, at my DNP meeting, my commercial included a bit about what I saw yesterday, on Sharks. Two women reported having sold around two million dollars worth of product without spending any money on marketing. They used Facebook, blogging and Pinterest, and that’s all! There may be no better testimonial for Social Networking.
For expert advice on how to leverage your online content and Social Media presence to improve your business, contact me. Mousehelp at Rouzell will help you get the attention you need to drive Internet marketing and ultimately, improve your sales volume.

This article began with a bit of research on the Meetup.com website. If you don’t know or care what Meetup is, please skip to the bottom of paragraph three, where the benefit begins!

One member of DNP (Desert Networking Professionals) suggested a potential improvement to the way people RSVP for meetings. She said she would like to RSVP for all upcoming meetings, without having to go through the three-click process for each date. I’ll write more on that in another article.

While I do plan to find a way to suggest this change to the good people at Meetup, the subject of this article came about as I was poking around on their “Help” pages. One, in particular, answers a common question, one I’ve answered many times for my clients:“How do I take a screenshot?”

They should make a few changes on that page. So, now, I have another reason to write to: support@meetup.com – good for me.
Perhaps they’ll hire me as their content editor.

For Windows users, it makes better sense to do a window capture (using Alt-PrtScn), rather than their suggested screen capture. After all, they only need to see what’s in the window and not your entire screen…

I don’t have a Mac or an iPad in front of me, so I cannot test those instructions. However, I can say their suggestion of command-shift-3 will capture the entire screen.

Mac method 1: Since you probably only need the active window: I suggest Command-Shift-4, which produces cross-hairs for a rectangle capture.

Mac method 2: Press Command-Shift-4, press the Space bar, move the camera pointer over the window to highlight it, and then click.

And, being an Android user, I decided to try those instructions…

Using their method; (they say, “While you’re holding down the Power button, press the Volume Down button”), does nothing but start the Device options and it turns down the volume on my phone! I prefer to do these things one at a time, thank you.

A search for the Android answer yields these instructions (that do work) from Digital Trends:

Pressing the Power and Home buttons at the same time will grab an image of the screen. This can be awkward to get right, so it’s important to remember to press both buttons at the same time, and hold them until the shutter sound is heard. (You need to hold the Power button slightly before pressing the Home button, then hold them both down.)

The bottom line – don’t believe everything you read. Even support people who are trying to be helpful sometimes get it wrong.
Check with mousehelp at rouzell dot com, or check out our YouTube channel. If you have questions, send email, call for an appointment, or search for Mousehelp!

Your challenge of using Social Media to promote business can be solved by a simple process. Here we will show one three-part solution to attracting more visitors to your website. Some assumptions are made about your computer skills and the form and content of your website and blog, and we’ll explain those along the way.

For now, consider these as being the first three requirements:

You have a website.

You have a blog.

You are a Facebook user (perhaps with a business page.)

Your website: Here we assume that when people land on your website, it’s obvious to them what you want them to do there. If the only thing on the homepage is this phrase: “Call now to learn more – (760) 555-5555” – your visitor knows what to do. So, keep it simple. Of course, most people want to know a bit more about you and your services or products, so you’ll want to feature the best of what you have to offer, in a clean and clear format. Groups of three make sense and for many people, it’s a small number of things to consider, and enough to tell most of the story about what you are selling. Give them easy to follow navigation, so they can dig deeper if they need more information, but keep the opportunity to contact you in front of them at all times. Your phone number and links to your email, or a contact page should be right there, so when they are ready to make the purchase, they can easily take that important step of connecting with you; and your website has done its job!

Your blog: This is where you have the opportunity to focus on any number of topics. You can post about any aspect of your business; the value you bring, what makes you or yours the best, the level of dedication or experience you bring, or you can go completely off topic and post about some event or some personal experience you have that allows your readers to know you as more than a salesperson; to know you are a REAL person. It may seem counterintuitive to not be always driving toward closing a sale, but people do business with people. So, if they get to know you, they make like you and trust you, and that may be why they call you in the end.

Your Facebook (business page): You can use a personal page on Facebook, if that’s where you get more attention from people who do business with you. The difference between a business and personal page on Facebook is outside the scope of this article, but you can click that link for more information. (Just be sure to come back here to finish this exercise!)

Use Facebook as a place to say; “Hey, look at this!” Knowing that Facebook changes all the time, you have the opportunity to post there as often as you like, and you can re-post the same links back to your blog or website as often as makes sense, to keep your blog content and business website in front of people on a regular basis. This is the “good news, bad news” feature of Facebook – the impression you make there is fleeting. That is the very reason you need a blog and a website – you need to provide a stable place where your prospects can go to get the information they need about your business to make buying decisions. Posting links to blog articles (with graphics, don’t forget) is the easy way to feed fresh new material to your friends and followers, so it won’t seem like you are posting the same old thing over and over. I’ll touch on this again in the summary.

Summary:

The three components of this article were provided in that order for a purpose. Your website is the ultimate destination, your blog is the connector, and Facebook is the “in your face” place where you can keep on saying, “look at me!” and people might do just that.

Without a website, you have no place to provide the static information people need when making buying decisions. For about twenty years now, we’ve been saying; “If you don’t have a website, you’re not REALLY in business.” That may sound heavy-handed, but hey, we are website developers and we want you to do business with us.

Blogging may be new to many people, as a way to drive business, but there are many businesses now whose entire business is based on their blog. For you, a blog is a place where you can continue to provide fresh new content (what Google loves…), so you can drive traffic to your website and give your Facebook fans something to consider on a daily (or more often than that, if you are so inclined) basis. With a few lines on Facebook and a link back to your blog, along with an eye-catching image, your blog give prospects a place to learn more about you and your business, before they click into your website for the full story.

Looking back at the title of this post, you might think it odd that Facebook came last in the order of things. However, your website and your blog have to be there, for this whole thing to make sense! Look again through this article, click some of the links, and if you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see the image and the link to this article there.

For more information on Mousehelp and Rouzell, click either of those links to land on my pages. Now, go write your next blog post, with links to your website, and post up on Facebook. I’ll be looking for you there.